Vladimir Pištalo’s Tesla: A Portrait with Masks

A Review of Vladimir Pištalo’s

Among the
late-nineteenth-century luminaries who accelerated the world into irreversible
modernity, few were as literally electrifying as the Serbian-American inventor
and engineer Nikola Tesla. A futurist, showman, and quintessential mad
scientist, Tesla was the main impetus behind alternating current, which allowed
energy to be transferred easily over long distances, and his public persona
dramatically engaged a world that was eager to be dazzled by shimmering
spectacle, forcefully rushing the age of the horse and buggy toward both
enlightenment and calamity. With his newly translated novel Tesla: A
Portrait with Masks, Serbian writer Vladimir Pištalo takes on the man and
the myth to create a novel of scintillating luster and wide-ranging resonance.

Vladimir Pištalo

Rounding up all the usual fin de siècle suspects—Thomas
Edison, George Westinghouse, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, and dozens of others—Pištalo
charts Tesla’s rainbow arc from obscurity to international fame and almost
completely back again, infusing the historical happenings with rich poetry and
unique vision. Structurally, this is a fairly conventional historical novel, written
almost entirely in short declarative sentences, but Pištalo casts it through a
dreamy and often surreal inner reflectiveness that weaves it all into a
dazzling yarn. Like Tesla, who didn’t believe in Einstein’s relativity, Pištalo
never truly bends time/space in his narrative, and so despite the modernist
subject matter, the novel’s greatest pleasures are actually in his time-tested
approaches to character and development, at which he excels. The repulsive
Edison, the warmly doddering Twain, the terrifying J.P. Morgan, and the
brilliant, bizarre, and baffling Tesla all come alive and spark off of each
other to luminous effect, taking the reader on a grand tour of the electric
age’s highlights.

Pištalo
doesn’t just dwell among the stars, however. His most vivid and moving
portrayals are of the under-side of life, of the people left behind in Europe,
and especially of the workers toiling in the sewers beneath the towers of the
American wealthy. After being swindled by Edison and then squeezed out of his
own company by unscrupulous backers, Tesla finds himself digging ditches in New
York, and his vivid, loving, brutal, and unsentimentally drawn fellow laborers
approach a Twain-like richness of humanity and tragedy. Mirroring all of this,
Tesla’s own under-side shadows him constantly, repeatedly pulling him down from
the heights that he can’t help from destructively overshooting. Likewise, he
can’t restrain the modern world that he’s helped to call into existence and that
to his horror is rushing toward unprecedented global conflict.

Nikola Tesla

While
Pištalo’s grasp of the time period’s movements and undercurrents are deeply
nuanced, his portrayals of Tesla’s actual scientific advances aren’t always
entirely convincing. In lieu of technical detail, he loads the narrative with
metaphor, focusing on the philosophical and literary resonances of each new
development. At turns Tesla is a cypher for Prometheus, the biblical Jacob, Don
Quixote, Milton’s Satan, Byron’s Manfred, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,
which can all be a bit much as Pištalo begins simply referring to Tesla by
these names. Nevertheless, as a meditation on humanity’s dually creative and
self-destructive nature, this highly polished novel serves as a classic literary
mirror of who we are and where we’re heading.